Instructor: Bump; <mailto:bump@mail.utexas.edu>; Office: PAR 132 Office phone: 471-8747
TTH 2:00 PM- 3:30 PM PAR 104; office hours: TT 10:45-11:15, 1:30-2; Tu 6-7 and by appointment. Course web site:
http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/~bump/E379S3/
“Larger universities must find ways to find ways to create a sense of place and to help students develop small communities within the larger whole.” Carnegie’s Reinventing Undergraduate Education: A Blueprint for America’s Research Universities (http://notes.cc.sunysb.edu/Pres/boyer.nsf)
You will summarize your college experience to date as English majors in multimedia projects, comparing it to that of students at Oxford or Cambridge in the nineteenth century. To help define your relationship with your Alma Mater we will focus on articulating a sense of place. Therefore, some class meetings will be outside, devoted to drawing and writing about places on campus and nearby in Austin and comparing them to comparable places in England. To make the comparisons more manageable we will focus on accounts of undergraduate life at Oxford and on nineteenth-century antimodernism, especially the concept of “Gothic,” and its key principle of “Truth to Nature.”
Projects will be devoted to “a virtual semester abroad.” We will create two multimedia writing projects on paper or on the web, of at least five to seven pages each, which can be combined to make a longer project. In any case, they must be extensively revised. The basic question is “How Would My Life Be Different and How Would It Be Similar if I Attended One of the English Universities Whose Seals Appear on the West Wall of the Main Building.” The first projects will focus on a famous person associated with one of those universities in the nineteenth century and will require some research. The second project can be an expansion of the first or a vision of life at U.T. as if it had been written by a famous nineteenth-century author such as Lewis Carroll, Thomas Hardy, or Max Beerbohm. As these names suggest, in class Victorian Oxford will be our primary example. Initial comments on the projects will be made by the instructor and other students in Blackboard Discussion format, with the instructor then focusing on polishing subsequent hard copies for word choice, punctuation, etc.
Grades. 50% of the final grade will be determined by the multimedia projects (15% for each first draft -- 150 points each, 10% for each revision -- 100 points each), 14% by the final portfolio of all your work (140 points); 30% by informal writing (300 points); 6 % by class participation (60 points). 900 points (out of 1,000) are required for an A-; 800 for a B-; 700 for a C-; 600 for a D-. Grades are not negotiable: students will receive exactly the grade recorded in the online gradebook in Blackboard, even if it is one point short of the next higher grade.
Informal Writing includes reading journals, in-class exercises and quizzes, and your individual learning record, encouraging students to set their own goals and become aware of their learning styles and obstacles. The LR includes a personal narrative, an interview with someone familiar with your intellectual development, a series of self-observations, and short interpretive essays written at midterm and semester's end. Late papers will be penalized.
Class participation consists of showing up in class on time with the right books, having read the material assigned for that day, and being prepared to talk about it. Students are encouraged to hand in journal pages about the readings assigned in the syllabus for that day before class starts. In any case, it is important to share in class: one of the goals of the course is better spoken as well as written communication, and learning to listen when others are speaking.
More features of my teaching philosophy can be seen at my web site:
http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/~bump
Printed Texts consist of the Writing Skills Handbook by Charles Bazerman; The Illustrated Zuleika Dobson by Max Beerbohm (Yale); Carroll’s The Annotated Alice (W. W. Norton); and Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure. Students will immediately need the course anthology, a collection of xeroxed materials from Jenn's, 2000 Guadalupe (basement of the Church of Scientology at 22nd , 473-8669). It will cost from $30 to $40 Jenn’s takes major credit cards, of course. If you don’t get there within the first few days you might want to call ahead to make sure they have a copy reserved for you (sometimes they do not print them all right away).